by Susana H. Case

My mother sang opera off-key
while she worked in her kitchen,
favored Pagliacci, a story

of entanglement. The dissonance
irritated me as a teenager
but became part of what I hold

close, the longing for what itches
most after it's gone, for the woman
who never got to use her passport.

Have a career, she advised. It's less
boring. I had a primeval fear
she would devour me,

like the gerbil mother I once observed
in a tank who meticulously
negated all her babies.

Have your own money.
Don't depend on any man.
The colonized body has two choices,

and either way, La commedia è finita!
Lie down with the devil.
Don't lie down.

There will be nothing when you run
out of figs. You will be
like the fireflies, practically gone.

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Susana H. Case is the award-winning author of eight books of poetry, most recently, The Damage Done (Broadstone Books, 2022). She is co-editor with Margo Taft Stever of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe (Milk & Cake Press, 2022). Case worked several decades as a university professor/program coordinator in New York City. She is a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. If This Isn't Love is forthcoming from Broadstone Books in 2024.

by Susana H. Case

after a Mapuche creation myth



When there was only air,
its spirits,
no good or bad,

I fell to earth for you, my love,
who could shoot desire
from your eyes,

turn everything into rock
and mountain, turn humans
into fire

burning the sky.
Did you not know the star
you took for yourself

and made into a woman
was me, so new that walking
hurt my feet? I grew

the grass to soften
the ground; I tried to soften you,
created birds and butterflies.

We were naked
when the planet shook
and volcanoes spewed,

making me tremble
with their ringing cracks.
We were naked when it was cold

and dark. It was a mistake
to listen to the anaconda’s deceit,
that creature formed

from the hair
of an evil spirit’s head.
When the moon

opened a hole in the sky,
I should have been careful
about who could hear me singing.

__________________________________________________________________

Susana H. Case is the award-winning author of seven books of poetry, most recently Dead Shark on the N Train, 2020 from Broadstone Books, which won a Pinnacle Award for Best Poetry Book. She is also the author of five chapbooks. Her first collection, The Scottish Café, from Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press and she has also been translated into Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology in New York City and can be reached at www.susanahcase.com.

by Susana H. Case

Remember Nim Chimpsky,
in his red knit sweater,
the chimpanzee that thought
he was human, learned to sign stone
when he wanted to smoke a joint?

Not made for complex language,
later he lived alone,
sad and immobile, inside a pen.
He asked for beer and oranges.

Give orange me give eat orange me eat
orange give me eat orange give me you.

You may be going blind,
my doctor’s words bite me:
yellow deposits of drusen in the eye,
and I rush to order the nutrients
he claims are my only hope,
capsules too big to swallow.

I shuffle between writing directives
for when I am dead, and wanting
to bonfire the papers.

If I were a pine, my rough barked arms
would stretch toward the sun.
I wouldn’t worry about eyes or words.
They’re selling pods now,
to grow death’s ashes into trees.

Give capsule me give swallow
capsule me swallow capsule give me
swallow capsule give me you.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Susana H. Case is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Dead Shark on the N Train in 2020 from Broadstone Books, in which “Sign” appears as the final poem. Drugstore Blue (Five Oaks Press) won an IPPY Award in 2019. She is also the author of five chapbooks, two of which won poetry prizes. Her first collection, The Scottish Café, from Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology in New York City. She can be reached at www.susanahcase.com